Island of Demons (54 page)

“But what about art and music,
Scherzo für Blechinstrumente
?”

He turned, tiny brush in hand and looked at me in exasperation. “Because various things come out of one head does not mean they have to be all same. That is the mistake that Margaret makes. You remember her telling us of places where it was normally expected that a man would take on several completely different sexual identities in the course of a single life? Well, why not the same but simultaneously? And not just with sex but also art. Margaret is obsessed with sex.”

There was a timid knocking, more of a scratching really, at the door. Someone said, “Yes please?” and a head appeared to peer at us. Walter rose.

“Mr Kasimura? How unexpected. Please come in.” Kasimura, the Japanese photographer from Denpasar. One forgets how many Japanese there were around, in the Indies, in those days. Most of the technicians, dentists, photographers were Japanese. Kaaimura was a thin, embittered man, locked in warfare with the Chinese merchant, Lee King, who held a monopoly in Western canned goods and had organised some sort of a boycott against him for what his kinsmen were suffering in Manchuria under the poking bayonets of Kasimura's fellow countrymen. Lee King had even set up a nephew in rivalrous business, with all the latest painted backdrops, including a sensational version of a transatlantic liner with real electric chandelier. Red-faced and panting, Kasimura was gripping the handlebars of a heavy iron bicycle that he appeared to want to bring in with him.

“Perhaps the bicycle would be better outside. It will be quite safe.” Kasimura bowed and hissed and complied, shuffling off cracked shoes to enter in bare feet. “Please sit down. Some coffee? But I see you are hot. Perhaps some water first? We have a whole river.” Oleg was called, came, disposed all smoothly. There were various ways of dealing with the subject of Walter's recent imprisonment. Some ignored it. Others stammered out something about not believing a word of it, while blushing furiously. Kasimura combined both in a silent reddening to the roots of his hair, sitting on the edge of the sofa, bent forward, hands in lap, his lack of ease a form of politeness.

“You haven't cycled all the way from Denpasar, surely, Kasimura-san?”

He tittered and ran his hand through his hair. Unlined, in his fifies, he still had a good thick head of black hair, damp now, as the water transformed itself into sweat.

“No, Walter-san. I came with the bus. The bicycle is from my friend at the waterworks down the road.”

“Is this a purely social visit, Mr Kasimura, or can I help you in some way?”

Japanese are the most businesslike of orientals, no need here to approach the topic like a lion stalking deer. Kasimura lay down his glass and picked up his coffee cup. He sighed, perhaps savouring occidental directness.

“Walter-san, I am travelling on behalf of a friend in Tokyo, a man who is in the sporting goods business. He wishes the Balinese to learn to play football, so that he may sell them equipment of Asian size at advantageous prices, and he has asked me to find an area of flat land, in the centre of several towns, where a football pitch might be established and to send him pictures. It seemed to me that Ubud is a good place to take pictures, very strategic.” He wrestled with the knotty consonantal cluster. Football? I recalled it bleakly from icy Amsterdam winters, myself the blue-nosed-snivelling boy hanging by his own goal as the games master stamped and raged “Run up, Bonnet! Run up!” Then cold showers, the humiliation of naked exposure, finally seeping chilblains. Walter frowned. All this did not make a great deal of sense.

“But the locals have no interest whatever in football, Kasimura-san, except – I suppose – the few who play on the
lapangan kota
but they are mainly Javanese. Not much business there. They don't even wear boots. They don't wear much of anything.” He smirked at me. Kasimura looked depressed. “And how is business?”

He sighed again and looked down at his pale, bony feet, unsuited to the playing of football. “Not so good since Mr Greg left.”

“Ah.” Greg had initially put a lot of work Kasimura's way: endless films, bought, developed, mounted on cards – that is until he and Margaret realised how extensive their photographic activity was to become. Then they had imported film directly in bulk and Greg had taken over the laborious winding onto rolls and the developing himself. Kasimura put his hand to his mouth.

“Oh, I am sorry, for I should not talk of Mr Greg since he became your enemy.”

Walter looked puzzled. “You are wrong there, Mr Kasimura. He is not my enemy. He is a good friend. He stood by me in my time of trouble.”

Kasimura shook his head. “No, Mr Walter. It is
you
who are wrong, yes please. You have, I see, no wireless. Perhaps you have not heard the news? Britain and France have declared war on Germany. London and Berlin are both in flames. Thousands, perhaps millions, have been killed by bombs. It is, I think, the end of the West and the beginning of the recognition of Japan's proper place in the world. This is very nice coffee.” That last two sentences said with equal satisfaction. Every cloud, he seemed to imply cheerfully, a silver lining. Walter gaped. I gaped. He found his tongue first.

“A war? Jesus! So it's really happened. But what can a war in Europe possibly have to do with Japan? And you mean the next time Greg and I meet we shall be on different sides and required to shoot each other? But that is absurd.” Walter sat down heavily, trying to come to terms with the news, lit a cigarette with fierce concentration. Secure in Dutch neutrality, I soothed.

“I don't think you should take a European war personally, Walter. If Greg has any sense, he's tucked away as safely in America as you are here.” I would learn later that Greg, already in British uniform, spent much of the next few years paddling in the lugubrious headwaters of the Irrwaddy, plotting to turn the river sudden red in Rangoon and thus dismay the Japanese by the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy. Walter was genuinely, headshakingly bewildered. He must be worried about his family. I knew he had siblings prominent in the ballet and opera of Berlin, a mother somewhere in Germany. Unlike my own family, the Spieses did not tread lightly on the earth, leaving no tracks. He brushed the hair back from his eyes and shook his head free of confusion.

“You are right, Bonnetchen. There are larger issues. For example, I have an order for two paintings from London. Now I don't know. Should I send them or not?”

As it turned out, Mr Kasimura was unjustifiably Wagnerian in his view of the war's course, for it had entered a stage, less
Blitzkrieg
than
Sitzkrieg
, what the English called the “phony war”, where each camp glared at the other from the security of its own side of the border but neither wanted to cross a conceptual line by deliberately breaking something. Political hostility had yet to be transmuted into the hard currency of personal hatred. In Europe, a long hot autumn and clement spring spun out inaction day by day – the calm before the storm. In neutral Bali, too, there seemed suddenly nothing to do but cultivate the arts of leisure, for tourists and European goods had virtually disappeared overnight, only deepening our sense of tranquil isolation and balmy security, the knowledge that Bali held aloof from a snarling world. In our boredom, we even went to a
janger
performance.

Ask about the origins of
janger
, as a dance, and you will receive the same sort of answers accorded inquiries into the sexually transmitted diseases of Europe. The French pox is the English disease is the Spanish distemper is the German plague, according to where you are. North Balinese declare
janger
to have been invented in the south, south Balinese in the north. In the east, it is from the west or even the offshore island of Nusa Penida. Everywhere, it is strange and exotic, enjoyed but despised and had swept the island as the musical sensation of the early Thirties. To
dance janger
is to be as irremediably common as a man who sits, in stained underwear, eating pickled herring straight from the jar. It has ancient origins, the same spirit-possession dances as Walter's own
kecak
, but simultaneously sweet- and soured with the dissonances of bitter Chinese opera, syrupy Malay theatre, sickly American songs and even the oompahing circus and it draws on a young teenaged pool of talent, divided ruthlessly into boys and girls. We had come at the instigation of Alit, there in the crowd, whose younger brother was an enthusiast of the genre. Inevitably, we were introduced to him – a skinny but moon-faced youth whose comrades went into sniggering elbow-digging that suggested they kept abreast of the latest law reports. As so often, I felt like a walking dirty joke. I was the titter that ran round the room.

The boys were divided into singers and
caks
, whose task was to chatter nonsense syllables in tight synchronisation, with rapid changes of speed and emphasis as Walter's monkeys did in
kecak
. They marched in and performed stylised movements of military drill – but more in the fashion of chorus girls – martial arts lunges at lightning speed and rapid dance steps. Then they leapt up onto each others' shoulders into extraordinary revolving pyramids that dissolved into gymnastic debris, reformed, bent into arches, dissolved again, all in time to a hammering
gamelan
with flute descant. Their costumes were an eclectic mix of elements of desirable modernity – tight football shorts, shoes and long stockings, bright red military tunics with gold epaulettes, white gloves, thick, corked moustaches and bibs covered with mirror fragments that sent light ricocheting like the revolving silver balls seen in common dancehalls. Their straining adolescent voices raged hoarsely. They smashed their fists into their palms, rocked, swayed undulated and crashed to a finale in – God help us – a mass Nazi salute.

Then it was the girls' turn, entering through the overarched arms of the boys, in swaying sarongs and sashes, headdresses of golden sunbursts trembling about their heads, flashing eye movements under the usual absolute control. Their voices rose in a high nasal whine, like a chorus of cats, as they took their places demurely in two seated rows, facing each other, reciprocally undulant, and the boys did the same to create a square. What happened within that square, over the next few hours, was a bizarre goulash of cultural influences. First, came a “Dutchman” in a long grey suit, spectacles and what was – surely – Walter's appalling beret, who made a long telephone call to the gods in Gunung Agung, arranging the programme for the evening, a brief song from the
arja
, or Balinese opera, an acting out of one of the more syrupy love stories of Hindu legend and a brief skit of two white people – Margaret and Greg? – being eaten by New Guineans in a comedy cannibalism scene. Then came more songs from the boys and girls, all with the same wild exuberance and intensity, a very correct rendition of Dutch nursery rhymes and an interaction between Capuk, the greedy braggart of Balinese theatre, and a dour and self-important Javanese student who made a loudly progressive political speech before being carried away for more fine dining by the New Guineans. The audience, that seemed to comprise every soul of the village regardless of age, loved it.

At midnight, we two had had enough and walked back alone through the velvet air, our feet crunching, in untheatrical modern shoes, on the gravel of the Dutch road, Walter so sunk in the Balineseness of the evening that he took my hand innocently, as one of the villagers would his friend's and swung it back and forth as we walked. “I know that was all pretty gruesome,” he mused, as though I were the one always railing against the Balinese neglect of their own musical heritage, “but it all shows a wisdom we lack. Even at their silliest, they go to the heart of things. The appeal of dictators and militarism is a matter of pure choreography, supplemented by nice shiny uniforms and rough boyish games. That is
janger
in short. They have turned history into spectacle not bloodshed, into art not politics. If it is bad art that is only because it comes from our own bad politics.”

I paid no heed to the rest of it, replying with grunts and mild affirmations – just as my father had when my mother was talking of shoes or hats or his children's hopes and dreams for the future, subjects in which he took no interest – the actual content of Walter's thoughts less important than the circumstances of them. My palm was tingling, in his, with a childish excitement at once sad and elated. Like many men, I had come to a point where I could say to myself, “This is not perfect but it is good enough, I can make do with this.” Like many others, I had grown accustomed to ranging love and sex on separate shelves with only the weasel word “affection” to confuse the two. I was – I saw – a mere reverberator for Walter's constantly hammering keys. He stopped and looked out over the valley, lit only by the stars and the fireflies.

“Do you know
Den frohen Wandersmann
?” he asked, “The old Eichendorff poem? Plumpe and I used to recite it to each other when we went hiking,” and launched into it. “‘
Wem Gott will rechte Gunst erweisen, Den schickt er in die weite Welt, Dem will er seine Wunder weisen In Berg und Wald und Strom und Feld. Die Trägen die zu Hause liegen, Erquicket nich das Morgenrot. Sie wissen nur von Kinderwiegen, Von Sorgen, Last und Not um Brot …
' There is much more …” It rolled on. I shut my ears to it, just listening to the music of his voice over the gushing river and suddenly, something Greg had said popped into my head.

“When you marry, old man …” this had been at a very early stage of our friendship, “… marry an anthropologist. They will have been trained for years only to say just enough to keep
you
talking and will
never
interrupt and, deep down, that's what every man really wants more than anything, a captive audience”. He paused reflectively. “That, of course, takes no account of Margaret.”